Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic messaging and more particularly to managing e-mail address confidentiality in an e-mail message.
Description of the Related Art
A variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems. Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties.
E-mail applications allow users to compose and send e-mail to different users, in addition to forwarding e-mails that have been received to other designated recipients. It is common for e-mails to be redistributed several times to many different recipients. As such, there may be times when a user intends to conceal the e-mail address of the sender but not the content of a message when forwarding an e-mail. Likewise, a recipient of a mass-distributed e-mail may not find comfort in others viewing the e-mail address of the recipient in the addressable fields of the mass-distributed e-mail—especially when the others are not known personally to the recipient.
Conventional methods of concealing the identity of an e-mail addressee include protecting the identity of the sender by manually removing the original name of the sender and e-mail address of the sender from the body of the e-mail before redistributing the e-mail. Also, to protect the identity of the recipient, every e-mail address for a corresponding recipient can be manually placed in the blind carbon copy (BCC) address field instead of the “TO” field. Still, conventional concealment methods place the fate of the identity protection of a designated recipient in the hands of the sender.
Consequently, if the sender chooses not to respect the privacy of a designated recipient in connection with an e-mail message, then the identity of the designated recipient will be revealed to all recipients of the e-mail message. Thus, the original sender and the potential recipients of a redistributed e-mail have no control over identity protection. Further, though users enjoy the option of manually deleting or hiding e-mail addresses, current methods of redistributing e-mails and protecting identities of users can most times be manually cumbersome since there is no automated process of pro-actively preventing exposure of user e-mails in a redistributed e-mail.